The present invention relates in general to plant biotechnology. More particularly, the present invention relates to methods and media compositions for the efficient direct organogenesis and indirect organogenesis of Jatropha plants, such as Jatropha curcas. 
The publications and other materials used herein to illuminate the background of the invention or provide additional details respecting the practice, are incorporated by reference, and for convenience are respectively grouped in the Bibliography.
Jatropha curcas belongs to the family Euphorbiaceae. Jatropha is a large genus comprising over 170 species. The plant Jatropha curcas lately attracted particular attention as a tropical energy plant. The seeds are crushed and the resulting oil can be processed to produce a high-quality biodiesel that can be used in a standard diesel car. The plant may yield more than four times as much fuel per hectare as that of soybean and more than ten times that of maize. A hectare of Jatropha has been claimed to produce 1,892 liters of fuel (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jatropha_oil). Jatropha curcas primarily propagated through seeds, and significant variations in seed yield and oil content have been observed in plants raised through seeds (Kumar & Reddy 2010, Pant et al., 2006; Jha et al., 2007). Thus, the conventional propagation through seeds is not reliable and vegetative propagation by stem cuttings is inadequate to meet the demand (Heller, 1996; Openshaw, 2000).
In vitro regeneration techniques offer a powerful tool for germplasm conservation, mass multiplication of true to type plants and genetic transformation. Considerable efforts have been devoted in the past two decades to develop efficient regeneration of Jatropha curcas using different composition of media. These reports include organogenesis from hypocotyl (He et al., 2009; Sharma et al., 2011; Sahoo et al., 2011), Epicotyl (Wei et al., 2004), petiole (Kumar and Reddy, 2010a,b, Dubey et al., 2010, Kumar et al., 2011a), stem (Singh et al., 2010) and leaf explants (Sujatha and Mukta, 1996; Sujatha et al., 2005; Deore and Johnson, 2007; Kumar et al., 2010a,b; Kumar et al., 2011a), shoot tip and nodal explant (Rajore & Batra (2005); Sreenivasachar, 2007; Datta et al 2007), cotyledon disc (Li et al., 2008) and somatic embryogenesis (Jha et al. 2007). The systems developed in the previous studies suffer from lack of efficiency and reproducibility and require large quantities of explants as starting material.
It is desired to develop efficient regeneration systems from thin sections of explants of Jatropha curacus. 